He was on his feet at once.

“Scatter,” said the newcomer, and Zibria and Piyanta left, drops of soup raining to either side.

The ladycat sat herself down. The tree elves didn’t offer her a meal (perhaps there was none left). They clung to each other and hid behind the pot.

“First things first. I see you’ve been fed,” she said. “I am Muhlama H’aekeem. The daughter and only child of Uyodor.”

He waited to be urged to sit again, but she didn’t mention it, and after a while he didn’t dare.

As if continuing a postprandial colloquy, she commented, “You are a brave Lion, to waltz in among the inestimable Ghullim without introduction or apology.”

“I don’t know your Ghullim ways,” he replied. “I don’t fathom the ways of communities in general, come to think of it. I have lived a while among Lions, but I am not essentially one of them. You must forgive me the brutality of my manners. Ignorance, I promise you, not superiority.”

“Well, of course, not superiority,” replied Muhlama. Her eyes were anthracite-hard, fixed, aqueous-but her tone had the faintest uplift of irony. “Where are you headed?”

Brrr had no destination. In a sense, his life of motion and restlessness, in successive waves of unsuccessful campaigns, had washed him up, cast him ashore on the lip of this very morning, with no further horizon to crave or even imagine. “Where am I headed? I suppose I was headed here, although I didn’t know it.”

Muhlama turned her head. It dawned on Brrr that they were perched on a blunted promontory above the encampment. While he was more or less on display, an ornament on a ledge, so were the splendid cats arrayed below. It was a larger tribe than others he’d encountered in the wild. He could examine their social organization as if it were drawn out in a textbook diagram.

“Has the Ghullim clan a name?” he asked. “A species name, I mean?”

“We are the Ghullim family. We need no other designation among ourselves. But I have known others to call us Ivory Tigers, which seems to be a nod to the apparent Tiger among our ancestors as well as to the Spice Leopard markings, which to some look like angle-cut slices of vanilla pod laid in imbrications.”

Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tigress. And below, her father en couchant, his forearms set decidedly as andirons. Marmoreal, he rested upon an ornate carpet knotted in golds and green silks. Back and forth among the cool stand of ferns behind him, his Ivory Tiger tail moved, like the head of a Water Cobra.

Around Uyodor H’aekeem’s carpet churned the workings of a government more regularized than any that Brrr had witnessed in the Animal provinces. Several elder Ivory Tigers, ambassadors or senators of some sort, conferred among themselves in tones soft and serious. Other male Tigers, disarmingly casual, patrolled the perimeter of the camp. The Tigers weren’t dissolute like Bears or paralyzed by endless arbitration like humans, but regimented and alert. Brrr realized he must have been given clearance to stroll into this group.